My new crime novel, set in an English seaside town in winter and featuring an unfathomable genius, international criminals, a kindly pathologist and a warm-hearted Dolly Parton tribute act with friends in low places!

SudokuXP - the world's favourite sudoku system.(OK, I made the "world's favourite" bit up, but it is very good!).
4X4, 9X9 and 16X16 puzzles, auto-crosshatching, mouse controls, save/restore,
multi-puzzle prints, hint system and 10,000+ puzzle database.
NEW - VERSION 5 with loads
of new features (click here for details).
Membership costs £3.60 (£3.00 to non-EU residents) but you only pay once and it's worth every penny!

Random
Sudoku Free and still available!Get a random
puzzle (ratings from 'easy' to the slightly scary 'outlaw') or type in your own. There's a
printer-friendly version, automatic possible-number hints
if you need help (or you can write your own if you want to do it properly), and if you're really stuck it'll solve it for you!

PLUS How
to solve sudokuguide.PLUS Sudoku
Gallery- over 700 pre-built, rated puzzles!
The Bath - Bristol
Cycle Path photo tour.
The entire 14-mile route in pictures.
See the beautiful Avon Valley, the steam railway at Bitton, picturesque
(and eerie) Mangotsfield station and the dark (but lit) Staple Hill
tunnel, then make the long descent into Bristol. With animated route map and
navigation tips, in Classic and Broadband editions!

The Bath to Bradford on Avon Cycle Tour.
Take the Kennet & Avon canal towpath along the tranquil Limpley Stoke Valley. The countryside's even more beautiful than the Bath-Bristol route, and
the scenery includes colourful narrowboats and two aqueducts!

NEW - Google and Microsoft maps of the tour routes - drag them, zoom them, see satellite pics! (See tour menu - requires broadband connection).
Client-server
quizLeaderboard issues fixed!Test your knowledge on a range of subjects, complete with three lifelines, tension-inducing sound effects, a real leaderboard
and Sumo-style player rankings (get your name on the board and become, er,
famous)! I've also fixed the leaderboard update process, so you can actually get on the board - try it!
NEW - Updated Banzuke (table of champions)!NEW - Sumo Quiz (plenty of new leaderboard points)!Paul's Panoramas.
New layout, new viewer applet, new
panoramas, all with links to maps and related(-ish) websites! Includes views of
Cornwall, London, Seattle and all 6½ Georgian Crescents in
Bath. Pan and zoom round
these 360° landscapes
now! NEW! Group Efforts Revisited!Five years after the workgrop soap ended, find out what the characters have been doing - including 'the Business' involving a certain C.J. Llewellyn BSc (Hons)! Includes an entry by Bernard Pierce himself!

PLUS Group Efforts - The Full Story. All 76 episodes plus tributes to our diarist extraordinaire from
his friends, colleagues - and enemies! Relive the adventure, as Bernard and his
comrades in the Line Management All Stars fight their heroic battles against CJ
Llewellyn and the dark forces of IT modernisation!(Note - entirely suitable for children and people of a nervous
disposition)Paul's Backgammon VaultsBackgammon games (and
the occasional tip) that you can watch in your web browser. View them
play-by-play or sit back and run them in autoplay. Why? Because it helps to
improve your game (and if you're into backgammon, they're fun to watch too). 400+
matches online already, and it's only just started!

Want to build your own animated backgammon website? See BG
Replay, the software that powers the Vaults!
Big Brother special - Housemate's Dilemma.
As this year is the bitchiest Big Brother (UK) ever, here's a special version of Prisoner's Dilemma, the game of cooperation and betrayal. Can you out-bitch your housemate, avoid being nominated and win the house a luxury food budget?
Runs in Internet Explorer and FireFox.
Avalaff - the antidote to digital TV bingo channels!No proper bingo on telly any more? Don't worry, we still play the real
thing, where you have to complete the patterns to win! No stake money, no
prizes, but all the fun and thrills of online bingo. See your name up there on
the leaderboard! Includes upgraded, high-speed Stats Edition for the serious
bingo-odds student.
New patterns plus NEW Balls Edition
- be a winner every time!

NEW! Avalaff Sig BuffleJust when you thought telly gaming channels couldn't get any worse, they did -
and so
have we! Try our new role-playing card-turn game (it's just for fun!) (Note - if you've never seen a
digital TV bingo channel you probably won't have a clue what we're on about, but
if you have, you might enjoy the joke. Either way, Avalaff plays a mean game of bingo
- and now card-turning too!) Avalaff is also at www.avalaff.net.

Hypertext fiction NEW!Hyperfiction breaks free of the
single-path, beginning-middle-end contraints of conventional storytelling.
In these two hyperstories you can make Billy's day (literally) and
discover what beautiful teenager Sam really feels about her life.

Paul's Web Design Pages- promoted higher
up the menu because people prefer it to the newer stuff!
Hints and tips on web authoring
from my magazine series. Includes IE4 and IE5 Dynamic HTML, Cascading
Style Sheets, the absolute basics of HTML and rather nifty (though I say it myself)
step-by-step guides to frames, forms, browser windows and image rollovers.
Old material, but still popular after all these years, which shows how far web authoring has come
recently. Cookie libraries added - and updated!

Minack Gallery.Pictures, slideshow and 11 (count 'em) panoramas of the
world-famous Minack Theatre at Porthcurno in Cornwall. See what it's like to be on stage in
front of a packed audience! Penwith Pictures.
Nice photos of West Cornwall, UK, one of the loveliest places on Earth.
Includes pics of Penzance, Newlyn, Mousehole, Sennen (lots!), Pendeen, St Ives,
Pothgwarra, Porthcurno and Bryher on the Isles of Scilly.Read and/or sign my Guestbook!Smart new format (I've installed a better
script). Be the first to sign the new-look book!

1999 Solar Eclipse Special.
Events as they
unfolded, recreated in glorious Dynamic HTML. PLUS my eye-witness
report and the old simulator so you can see what it would have been like
without the clouds!

Not-a-weblog DisclaimerUPDATED (a bit).
This site is not a weblog, but that doesn't mean I can't put weblog-style
stuff in this column to fill it up, does it? So on that basis....

I'm viewing this site in...Mozilla FireFox, and I suggest you do the same, except for the Panoramas,
which are great in Opera.

I'm watching...Casualty and Holby City, although I'll be able to stop next year when they move Casualty to Cardiff (I only watch out of loyalty to Bristol). I still watch This Week, although
these days it's mainly in the hope that Diane Abbott and Michael Portillo will actually start canoodling on that sofa.

I'm reading...
The
Sailor's Return, by
David Garnett.
He also wrote the slightly mind-boggling 'Lady into Fox', about a bloke whose wife turns into an, er, fox. I'm also just finishing Down Among The Women by Fay Weldon - a great book by a brilliant writer, who's 80 now so won't be here too much longer.

I'm drinking...Decaff coffee. Stick some
Coffee Mate in it and it tastes like the real thing, but doesn't make your
arm go stiff after four cups. Magic!

I'm writing in...English (allegedly),
JavaScript (love it),
PHP (just
about). As well as an excursion or two into ASP, I've also now done quite a bit in, er ColdFusion (see here). CF is actually very good, although whether Adobe will want to stay in the app server market is another matter. OK, I'll get my coat...

I believe...
That Apple will end up a niche player in the phone/media player market just like they are in personal computers. Customers know instinctively that multi-vendor platforms are safer. Android (or something else) will win.

I don't believe...
...that the Coalition Government will be able to achieve anything like the savings they reckon they'll get from the public sector.